JMJ

After-Story

Chapter Forty-Three

Red Haze

Clang! Crash! Bang!

Starscream felt every bump and collision rattle through his body against what had once been a bath-house— a place for rejuvenation and calm not so very long ago in Cybertronian terms, nor was it lost upon him, the irony of fighting with such a building. He had even gone to this one before in a time that already felt an age ago. The oil had been warmer and smoother than most and the stalls larger and more prestigious, as he recalled. Of course, it was mostly geared towards the warrior class, and Starscream had technically not been invited to it. That had only made it more satisfying to get away with it, actually.

But his head was spinning more than his body. He collapsed into a corner between two massive akroterion flourishes upon this rooftop, and his mind was bounced back to the present.

He could no longer hear the sound of flying jets.

He rubbed his aching skull and tried to find their location— still unclear results. The radiating of the nearby energy tower had already been confusing signals all morning, but Starscream did not need a computer to tell him what had happened. It would take some time before they found him, commander of the Decepticons or not, and what they found later might not be recognizable.

What better way to finished off his opposite of a massaging, head-clearing, and rejuvenating bath, than to be blasted into oblivion after crashing from a shot in mid-flight.

No. He could still escape!

Despite the pain, he pried himself upright. It was mostly his wing that sustained injury.

Smoke rose in plumes of noxious fumes from the streets below clouding vision from time to time and irritating inner-workings, but he was not far from the next building.

Perhaps, if he could simply leap.

Heavy footsteps sounded behind him.

The Prime.

That's who had shot him down. Before Starscream turned, his mind replayed the shot that had downed him. If it had been only slightly more direct and Starscream's agility had just failed a little more, he could be offline at this very moment. But the present was still lively and well around him as he looked upon his adversary.

Brighter than day he shone above him. Despite the haziness of the sun through Cybertron's ever-thinning atmosphere, it seemed to Starscream to shine brighter against his outer casing than he had seen in some time like a herald of justice. His weapon aimed, ready to fire with an easy stroke. He could picture in his mind his burning spark meeting with the loud, toxic, harsh air around him and blowing out like a flame in a chill breeze.

"No!" he screamed.

Instinctively, Starscream dropped, covering his head with his hands.

"No! Please!" he begged haggardly. "Please, have mercy! Have mercy!"

He expected no mercy. He expected his pleas to be ignored. He was the commander of his enemies. He was the fastest flyer of all Lord Megatron's flights. To take out Megatron's Second, would be just one step nearer to winning the war for the Autobot side, especially a commander as skilled, tactical, and loyal as Starscream.

But no weapon fired.

He could feel an uncertain heave from the great Prime. The shadow of his weapon passed over Starscream's closed optics. With the greatest care he opened them with teeth clenched in his oral vent. The expression on Optimus' face was not one of hatred, though he saw plenty of anger; it was not repulsion, though disgust was evident enough; it was sad, but more than that. Was it… pity? Though, his pity clouded with confusion quickly as he blinked down upon his helpless opponent now analyzing him back.

Starscream might have taken that opportunity to fire at least a laser, but he could not escape from a Prime even if his laser hit a fine mark. His optics, maybe? No, Starscream could not risk it. His missiles would have taken too long to fire and this would be unpleasantly close range being unable to bolt away in flight easily. Though, as he considered this, he felt that he would be able to fly if he had too. Clumsily, perhaps, but he felt that he still could lift off.

But Starscream's curiosity also played its part in awkward pause.

As Starscream gazed into Optimus' face that had never been so close as this to his before, he could not help but wonder what was going on behind that expression. Starscream did not realize how he gaped as he stared. Aside from having removed his arms from his face, he had not moved from his pitiable position sprawled out at Optimus' feet.

Although obviously a tad slow in mental-processing, Optimus' face showed no sign of stupidity…no sign of oppressiveness either. He was not quite how Megatron described him: as a fool, as a cold puppet of the council. But then, Starscream knew even without the enmity between his lord and the Prime, that Megatron was not exactly known for understanding…

Hmm, how would I put it, Starscream thought, personalities of more quietness to their actions than he?

But this could all be a façade of some sort. He was the leader of his lord's enemies, after all— Starscream's enemies.

Starscream shook his head.

"What are you waiting for, Prime? Am I to suffer the fate of your fallen council-members in an act of vengeance for them, or am I to become your prisoner?"

Starscream felt most satisfied that he sounded brave. Except for that quiver at the end— a near choke. Starscream winced.

Optimus' face hardened.

"Starscream," he said with full and not withheld drama, and he took a few paces back.

Starscream had room to climb to his feet, but he remained entirely on guard.

"I should finish you off after everything you have done to aid Megatron," said Optimus.

To make a show of looking more injured than he was, Starscream allowed his weight to fall upon the broken akroterion design behind him. He held out a hand to support him against it, and allowed his panting to continue as it wished despite the distasteful fumes.

"But… I cannot with you in this state. It does not feel right to me."

Starscream made a face. "What?"

#

Life imprisonment was his sentence at the trial. There may have been no banging of the gavel, but the sound of Bumblebee's voice was final.

During his trial he had been as small and meek and pitiful a creature as ever one had seen. He had implored, he had begged, but as Bumblebee put it, there was no promise of Starscream's that any of the Autobots could trust.

Vehicons— or, as the Autobots now called them, Vehibots— appeared on either side of him to take him back to his cell.

He could see the guilt in Bumblebee's optics. A similar sort of guilt had always glinted in Optimus Prime's eyes. Or "pity", perhaps was the more correct word, and pity was not enough to make Bumblebee change his decision no matter how Starscream tried to play with it, to encourage it, and made it flourish with words in miserable tones and humility with hands held together.

Starscream could not be trusted.

"Unless something changes to prove Starscream's change of spark," said Bumblebee, "he will be forever forbidden to see Cybertron save through a screen."

For the first few seconds Starscream only stared out in a sort of despair, but anger quickly rose. Starscream did not withhold his growl of rage. He shook with it. The violence of it and the hated blazing forth from his crimson optics was more than enough to prove to everyone present that the judgment upon him was just, and he knew it, but somehow that made him resent the whole thing all the more.

"You'll rue this day, Autobots!" Starscream snarled savagely, almost gruesomely; he even spat up energon as he spoke, "I promise you! I will forever be a dark blight upon your shining sanctimonious society! You'll be sorry!"

His voice capacitator cracked. The menace returned to frantic fear and desperation before the end, but it was too late to prove anything to anyone. They all knew him well.

"The jury was not impartial!" he whined. "You're all prejudiced against me! Optimus Prime would have given me a chance! Optimus Prime made you give Knock Out a chance, but it was too late for him to sanction a chance for me! Is it my fault that chance and destiny are against me!?"

He tried to fall upon his knees again, but the Vehibots help him up again. He thought of tearing away, but he simply went on begging, "I—I never wanted a part of the Decepticons! Megatron tricked me! Brainwashed me! It's his fault not mine! I was a forsaken hatchling! Ignored by society! Scorned by the council! Hated for being different! It's not my fault! I'm a victim! A victim, you hear! Just give me one more chance! One more chance! I'll prove myself!"

"Starscream," said Ultra Magnus sternly, "the trial is over."

"Wait! Please, I beg you! No!" Starscream screamed between panting intakes. "I beg you to reconsider the verdict! Please!"

He was being dragged away by now; though it still took four Vehibots to do so. His weapons and transforming abilities were already disabled. His hands were laser cuffed. Though he shoved the Vehibots a bit, they soon overpowered him, and it was not long before four black walls greeted him again with the sealing up of a heavy magnetically-sealed door.

It was a clean, gliding sort of door, so there was no bang. What Starscream would not have given to hear it bang instead of softly suction itself to the seal into the floor! He would not even have the satisfaction of the magnitude, the finalizing or a bang.

Rage, despair, fear, resentment, loneliness… There Starscream remained sprawled on the floor, all negative emotion pulsing at once through his mental processing systems so that he felt his brain modules would burst asunder into molten flame.

Eternity in this darkness awaited him alone with his thoughts. Starscream did not know if he could bear it. They might as well have put him into stasis-lock for how miserable he would be here all by himself with only broken memories as his companions. But stasis-lock was too good for Starscream apparently, even though he knew that if it had been their decision to put him into stasis-lock he would have hated and feared such a fate more than an eternity alone. He would have begged to be conscious in his imprisonment than put into uncertain unconsciousness.

He stared into the empty glow of the red from his optics upon the otherwise blackened floor, recalling to mind a dream-world where that same red haze hung so omnipresent, where Optimus and Megatron were immortalized as living statures on either side of his throne. In his dream, had his throne only been an empty seat in a prison cell? Had this fate been all he had been dreaming of and Optimus and Megatron only immortalized statues in his own imagination?

"Ah, but then," he reminded himself miserably, "it always has been thus. Only two people in the whole universe have ever considered me as anything other than something to be thrown away, and my prison has always been my own mind. The new council is no different from the old in this regard— of being thrown away."

Starscream closed his optics.

Not even my days as a hatchling had been filled with any warmth, he told himself, even though that was not entirely true either.

There had been a very kind nurse that had treated him with gentle affection for those two weeks of his growing up even when he did not get along well with other hatchlings at times. But now he only remembered her scolding and warnings not her words of encouragement for a sensitive spark. When he had been first injured severely in the mines, Elita One herself had accompanied him to the medical center and afterwards treated him with care. She had even offered to take him under her wing to help him— perhaps in a manner than might have been considered by other races to be maternally-so. But then even if Cybertronian females were not biologically maternal, they had more of an instinct for a nurse's care than males. In Cybertronian the word that better translated this minority among Cybertronians was "nurse-type" rather than "female" even if they usually fit the female description according to other races.

"You don't have to be alone," he recalled her saying, an old, sad, flight and miner she was.

He had only pushed her away, especially after meeting Megatron as he pushed her memory away now. He had had no need for a nurse. He had not wanted a nurse. There were only two people in his mind that had showed him any regard as a Cybertronian, as an equal, and as a person with dignity.

"How they were polar opposites one from another in all but that they were great leaders both physically and mentally," Starscream murmured to himself; he had always had a habit of talking to himself, and there was no reason to hold back now that he was going to be his only company for quite some time. "The mighty warlord, master of the Decepticons, Megatron, and Optimus Prime of the Autobot Cause."

His heavy panting had ceased. He sat quietly on the floor now upon his knees, facing the door as though some altar lay beyond it that was denied him.

As he thought of those opposing figures, immortalized in his mind as clearly as though they stood on either side of him no matter how he knew them both to be terminated, he felt very small and insignificant. He hated that feeling. He had always despised it, had always tried to stifle it with dreams of power and might, dreams that became reachable goals in his mind at one time even to become leader himself, but he had learned rather recently that he could not be leader only a follower of some greater power.

"It may well be," he continued to himself, "that neither Megatron nor Optimus truly saw anything in me but a loose cannon to be tamed for their own sides, but both understood me more than anyone else that I know."

Would things have been different had he chosen to follow Optimus instead of Megatron?

Perhaps.

He recalled Optimus' original pathetic attempts atop an old, warrior-class bath-house to sway him to his side. Starscream was positive it had been his first attempt to sway any Decepticon, but a Decepticon was no lazy council member.

However at the time, Starscream had been so young and naïve, part of him had almost wished to go with him before the end, save that he had been given a chance to flee, which he took like a bird through an opened window.

#

"You led me to believe that Orion Pax was only a fool of the Council, a fool who stole your position almost unwittingly, despite his selfish aims," said Starscream. "I fear he is much wiser than you gave him credit unless it is only the wisdom of the Matrix, which has given him his eloquence."

"The Matrix of Leadership is knowledge, but not wisdom in itself, Starscream," said Megatron darkly as he turned at last from the computer screens he was gazing at. "It indeed transforms whoever takes ownership over it into a Prime. Now he is Prime, and Primes with their knowledge can lead others to believe many things."

His expression was mostly optics in Starscream's vision as the chamber was so dark that with the bright light of the screens behind him, the crimson of Megatron's optics lit up only around those mechanisms of sight. How they pierced Starscream, how they searched his very spark. He felt in those optics a warning stronger than the tone of his level voice, but Starscream, the young and naïve, was not about to allow them to daunt his pressure for some answers.

"But Lord Megatron, surely he believes what he says is true."

"A change of spark, Starscream?" sniffed Megatron as he stepped towards him.

Starscream gasped at the thought.

He could feel the heat, the hatred for Prime, radiating from Megatron's body as he came within a few Cybertronian feet away from him.

Quickly, Starscream shook his head and gathered his thoughts from his disoriented neural net. "No, no, of course not, Master! I—I only meant that I felt I should have the full truth of Optimus Prime. As I explained, he did not destroy me, though he had ample opportunity. It seemed like weakness at first, and yet— well, it's not as if he had reason to fear me at that point. He was likely to take me prisoner, but he—" Starscream stopped.

He was not sure he wanted to tell Megatron all that Optimus had said. He was not sure why, but he withheld it. Maybe Megatron already guessed, but he could not bring himself to speak it out loud. It was too stupid. How Lord Megatron would think him a fool for even giving Optimus' words an analysis!

With a sort of choke, Starscream added, "He was not given the chance with my agility in his slowness."

He grinned. "Although mighty and powerful, Optimus is a slow creature."

Megatron's monstrous brows lowered like a pair of hunched wings over his optics. The dangerous glint quivered in the pupils.

"Do not underestimate him," said Megatron. "There are worse things than bringing a person offline, and the knowledge of Primes can deceive you to let your guard down. If ever he appears to let his down again, you are not to let yours down in like manner. See how his guiles interfered with your senses. When you escaped him, even, you did not alert your squadron to your position or his, and you might have tried. Despite lock-on positioning being distorted, voice communication was still intact well-enough. He distracted you with words that allowed his Autobots to work against us while you chatted idly about virtue and then came running back to me with qualms like a hatchling to his nurse."

Anger built inside Starscream.

Megatron had not been there. Listening to Optimus had been the only way to escape being caught or killed. Using full speed straight back to base had been the only way to ensure any other Autobot was not lurking in the shadows to blast him down again. The Prime surely was not alone, and he had not been about to risk the time to call anyone about it while using only his own optics to analyze suspicious shadows or thick concealing smoke. There were many Autobot flights about despite Starscream's order for their top-priority terminations.

He ignored the fact that he might have carried a tracker that would have led him straight to Megatron, and that the medics had already scanned him for that possibility. He had been clean.

Rage filled his spark. He could not decide whether he was angrier at Megatron or Optimus at this point, but hatred burned through his optics as he bristled and hunched into himself like a beast ready to pounce, but upon what, he could not have said. He felt small, belittled, mistrusted. He would not have been surprised if the word "benefits" would soon appear on Megatron's lips if Starscream dared to press the matter further.

Lord Megatron may have been afraid of Optimus, but he was not— at least not past his physical weapons and prowess. No, Optimus was weak for allowing him to live and for having pity on him just like that miserable, hopeless Elita One trying to turn him into a sentimental fool like her to disregard Megatronus' call to arms and revolution and join the Aerial-bots in the opposition. He would show Megatron one day. He vowed it to himself on the spot.

"Never again, do I make myself clear?" demanded Megatron.

Starscream bowed.

"Perfectly, Master," he said barely above a whisper.

#

It was the first time he had doubted Megatron's sincerity. Well, he knew he hid things. He was a Decepticon. Starscream understood that well enough, but Starscream was his loyal second. If Megatron could not trust Starscream then Starscream saw no reason to trust Megatron. It had created for the first time a dent in his smooth career as the commander. It had given him a doubt that had never truly left him. It had only grown over time into the emptiness and distress which filled him later in the war, especially by the time he had met with Megatron on Earth.

Would it have made a difference if he had simply followed Optimus that day instead of returning to Megatron?

Would he have been happy and fulfilled as Jetfire and Knock Out seemed to be after letting go of pride and causes and allowing life and virtue to fill them instead?

Starscream doubted it.